Entrepreneurial alertness and self-perceived employability: a virtuous marriage for career development

Abstract

PurposeBuilding on the importance of students becoming entrepreneurs of their own career, this research aimed to achieve two main objectives: to empirically test the sequential relationship between the three dimensions of entrepreneurial alertness as proposed by Tang et al. (2012) and to link such dimensions to self-perceived employability.Design/methodology/approachA web survey data were obtained among a sample of 404 universities students. The test of the theoretical framework was performed by running a structural equation modeling (SEM).FindingsThe results show that the three entrepreneurial alertness components are sequentially related. Moreover, the results demonstrated that among the examined dimensions, only evaluation and judgment had a direct effect on self-perceived employability, with the remaining dimensions having an indirect influence.Originality/valueThere has been rarely any previous empirical attempt at investigating a framework that consider the relationship between entrepreneurial attitudes, such as alertness, on employability. The investigation of the entrepreneurial attitudes as antecedents of employability is particularly vital to graduates who will soon enter the labor market as “entrepreneurs of their own career”.

Impact of different types of entrepreneurial alertness on entrepreneurial opportunities identification

“…(Ekelund and Kirzner, 1974 ; Brown et al, 2019 ). In recent studies, entrepreneurial alertness is considered a complex cognitive process in which individuals actively identify entrepreneurial opportunities (Montiel-Campos, 2021 ; Cavaliere et al, 2022 ; Crespo et al, 2022 ). Tang et al ( 2012 ) define entrepreneurial alertness as a mental activity from scanning for new information to associating with heterogeneous information from different sources and evaluating potential entrepreneurial opportunities, including scanning and search, association and connection, and evaluation and judgment.…”